


The Strangest Things

by dontdowhatihavedone



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hallucinations, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 01:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1207738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontdowhatihavedone/pseuds/dontdowhatihavedone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren Jaeger knew he was crazy.</p><p>He’d known it since he was seven and had a friend no one could see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Strangest Things

**Author's Note:**

> Title from this song:  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmxztx8ixk
> 
> I'd like to say I'm sorry in advance

Eren Jaeger knew he was crazy.

 

He’d known it since he was seven and had a friend no one could see.

 

His parents laughed it off, when he was little. They said that Armin was just his “imaginary friend.” Eren didn’t like that they had called Armin that- it sounded mean. When he got a little older, he learned that imaginary meant not real.

 

He never learned what to do when your imaginary friend was real.

 

So he stopped talking about Armin, but they’d play together when his parents weren’t watching. Armin was almost always with Eren, and even though he couldn’t touch his friend or play too well with him (Armin couldn’t ever touch anything), Eren loved him. He had never had too many other friends, so his strange imaginary one who seemed to understand everything about him was perfect.

 

They always talked about travelling the world. Armin would take Eren to the library and point out big books on shelves filled with amazing pictures of far away places. Armin always seemed to know everything about those places, and he would talk for hours on end, Eren listening enthusiastically, and the adults walking by would chuckle to themselves about the strange little boy sitting by himself on the floor of the travel section.

 

But Armin was weird, too. He sometimes said things about “walls” and “Titans.” Eren didn’t understand what he was talking about- there were no walls around their city, and when he asked what a Titan was he only got confused looks or answers about some made-up creatures from a long time ago.

 

Still, Eren loved his friend. Armin stayed with him always, even when Eren got upset and threw tantrums. He would just sit quietly and wait until the bigger boy had kicked and screamed himself into a silent little puddle of angry tears on his bedroom floor, and then he would talk about the ocean or the desert or the jungle. And whenever Armin showed up crying in Eren’s room, Eren would calm him down by promising violence to the people who made him sad.

 

* * *

 

When Eren was nine, he got a new imaginary friend. A girl with dark hair and wide dark eyes showed up when Eren was in a grocery store with his mom. No one else was looking at the girl crying silently at the end of the aisle, but Eren marched up to her and asked what was wrong. She just looked at him, eyes swimming with tears, and asked where she was supposed to go now. Eren furrowed his brow and told her she was going to come home with him. Her eyes went even wider and wetter, and Eren watched until she had sobbed herself into silence before getting her to follow him and his mom out of the store. When he told his mom about his new friend, she laughed, but said he was getting “too old for these imaginary friends, Eren.”

 

Eren scowled out the window, Mikasa sitting quietly next to him in the backseat. They weren’t imaginary, it was just that no one else could see them. They were special, just for him.

 

* * *

 

When he was ten, Eren woke up screaming from a nightmare. Mikasa and Armin crouched in a corner of his bedroom, crying, watching him cry. The babysitter his parents’ had hired before they went out that morning came running in, trying to calm him down, telling him that no, his mom was fine, it was just a bad dream, he was okay, she was okay, no walls broke, there were no Titans Eren it’s all in your head Eren it’s okay.

 

Not even five minutes later, she got the phone call.

 

Standing by a hole in the ground, the shadows inside as black as his clothes, Eren watched them lower a box into the earth. They told him his mom was in there, that she was dead and she wasn’t coming back. Eren’s dad hadn’t said a word to him since the night he woke up screaming. Eren just hadn’t said a word. He watched the dirt swallow his mom like an evil gaping mouth and he knew somewhere in his tiny little heart that he was cursed. Mikasa and Armin stood beside him, watching the hole fill in.

 

“How could they break the wall?” Armin whispered. “Why now?”

 

Eren didn’t have an answer.

 

* * *

 

By the time he was thirteen, he knew he was crazy. You’re seeing things, Eren, there are no people in your head, Eren, no, Eren, why would anyone have friends no one else could see unless they were insane? Eren knew he was crazy, but he kept quiet about it, and he kept away from other people.

 

He heard them, when he walked down the halls of his middle school, whispering about how he was a weirdo and his mom died and his dad vanished and now he was in foster care but he couldn’t find a good home because he still woke up screaming from nightmares every night, he still heard his mom screaming in his ears when he closed his eyes, and he still had conversations with people who weren’t really there.

 

He knew he was crazy, and when his new “imaginary friends” appeared, he knew he was just getting crazier.

 

Twelve new people lived in his head now. It was terrifying when he first started seeing them, and he claimed illness and stayed home for a week. They were everywhere. Almost everywhere he went they were there now, laughing and talking with each other and teasing him and always always always talking about those walls and those Titans he didn’t know, would never know. They were trainees, they told him, they were gonna fight the Titans and defend humanity from them. Eren didn’t understand, he told them he didn’t understand, but when he said that it was like they couldn’t hear him.

 

Armin and Mikasa were still with him. They were older now, their eyes heavy and sad. Eren knew that Armin’s family had died, he knew that he was Mikasa’s only family, but he didn’t understand why. He knew he wanted to protect them, make them laugh and make their eyes happy again, but he couldn’t protect him from things even he couldn’t see.

 

* * *

 

When Eren was fifteen, he woke up from another nightmare to watch his friends die.

 

He didn’t know why, he didn’t know what was happening, he just knew that everyone was panicking. Even Jean, who always pretended to be cool and unaffected, looked terrified. Eren tried to find out what had happened, but all they would say was that the wall was broken, it broke the wall again.

 

Eren was terrified too. All he could remember from the nightmare was a raw-red face and massive white teeth, hauntingly familiar. He knew that face. He knew it from five years before.

 

One by one, the figures running through his room, flickering through walls and furniture as they always did, vanished. He was left with just him and Armin and Thomas and Nac and Mina and Mylius. Armin looked scared. Eren hated that look on his face, he hated it, he hated the way Mikasa had walked up to him and told him to not die before she left too, he hated that he was crazy he hated it hated it hated it but how could he live without Armin and Mikasa? And now Armin looked scared. He blurted out a line about the Titans, how they were going to kill them all, but he didn’t know anything about the Titans, much less how to fight them. Armin gave him a gratefully determined smile, and the figures in front of him in their weird belts and tan and white uniforms charged through his bathroom wall and disappeared.

 

Eren sat in his bed and waited.

 

Barely a minute later, he heard a pained gasp from beside his bed. His head turned slowly, gray-green eyes landing on Thomas. Blood was spreading across the boy’s stomach, clothes and flesh slowly ripping apart, and his mouth dropped open. “ _Why_ …” he breathed.

 

Thomas’ body flickered and vanished. Eren just stared, blood starting to ring through his ears, rage boiling up inside him, igniting the hate that still swirled in his chest. He screamed.

 

His foster parents ran in just in time to watch him throw himself at a wall, screaming about how Mina was dying and Nac was dying and Thomas had died and Armin was gonna die but Armin can’t die Armin  _can’t_ die ARMIN CAN’T DIE DO YOU HEAR ME HE CAN’T DIE HE CAN’T I WON’T LET HIM I’LL KILL THEM I’LL KILL THEM ALL-

 

* * *

 

They told Eren he had a psychotic break, that he had something called P-T-S-D from his mom’s death and that was why he sometimes saw things.

 

Eren knew that he had been crazy before the car hit his mom's, he knew he had been crazy his whole life, he knew that the drugs they gave him weren’t going to stop the visions or make him better because you can’t fix a broken thing, not really.

 

Eren kept his mouth shut and nodded when it was appropriate and flushed the pills down the toilet as soon as he got home.

 

He didn’t know what had happened or why his friends died, he just knew that they were dead. Marco was dead too, Jean told him, killed and left in an alley where no one had seen him and no one had cared. He died uselessly, Jean said, and Eren saw his eyes take on the same weight as Armin’s and Mikasa’s and his.

 

Annie disappeared too, but they said she had just joined the Military Police, that she wasn’t dead. Jean made a crack about how now she would live longer than any of them. No one laughed. They were in the Scouting Legion now, they told him. They had joined him and they were gonna go beyond the wall and fight Titans, and even though he was a Titan now he was still gonna help them fight and they were gonna save humanity. Eren didn’t know what they were talking about, but he was getting too tired to wonder anymore.

 

He started seeing new people, just four this time. They were Petra and Auruo and Gunter and Eld and they were adults, the first adults he’d ever seen. They didn’t like him at first, Eren knew they didn’t, because now everyone was scared of him- everyone except Armin and Mikasa. They warmed up to him though, getting nicer as the weeks went by, and for the first time in a long time Eren felt like he might finally have adults who actually cared about him, rather than the shitty foster parents he’d been pinballed from for the last five years of his life, adults who actually were looking out for him.

 

Eren watched them die too, sobbing in a corner of his new bedroom at four AM, just a few weeks after his other friends died, just a week after he’d been shuffled off to a new foster home. Armin and Mikasa weren’t there this time, and Eren shoved his t-shirt between his teeth to quiet his crying, alone in his room in the dark, and he wondered yet again why he was cursed to be crazy like this.

 

* * *

 

A couple days later, he was standing in a coffee shop, Armin and Mikasa beside him, waiting in a line that stretched nearly to the door for an overpriced cup of bitter caffeine. He’d never liked coffee, but he never got much sleep either, especially not the last couple of nights. He kept dreaming about his dead squad members, how they had all been so quickly and efficiently destroyed, and how he would kill whoever did it, how he would wring their neck and tear their guts out and crush their hearts and _eat them_ -

 

A cold tingle ran up his neck. He turned slowly.

 

Annie stood behind him, blue eyes cold as concrete.

 

“You killed them,” Armin said.

 

Eren looked at him. “What?”

 

The woman in line behind him gave him a weird look and shuffled a little further away.

 

“She killed them, Eren,” Mikasa said from his other side, voice as low and hard as always.

 

Eren looked at her, confused.

 

“Your squad mates. She killed them, and she killed all those Scouting Legion members.”

 

“No…” Eren breathed. “No, she didn’t, she’s my _friend_ , she wouldn’t-”

 

“It was her, Eren,” Mikasa interrupted. “You know it was.”

 

 _I know it was_ , he thought to himself. _I… know it was_?

 

He turned back to Annie, blood thundering through his veins, drowning out the rest of the cafe. She just stared at him, expressionless as ever, but Eren knew. “ _I know it was_ ,” he breathed, and then he couldn’t stop the anger in his chest and the hate in his heart and the crushing confusion and fear and sadness in his soul.

 

“YOU KILLED THEM!” he screamed. People started and scrambled, trying to talk to him and calm him down and stop him as he stalked towards Annie, who just looked at him with the same blank face. “YOU _KILLED THEM ALL! I’M GONNA KILL YOU_!” He started running, shoving people and tables out of the way, heedless to the cries and threats from the people around him.

 

Eren was still screaming when his fist went through the window.

 

* * *

 

A thick black line followed the felt-tip pen he dragged across the snow-white paper, the trembling from his hand translating into waves as he finished the stem on another letter _y_. _Crazy_ , he had written, _crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy_ covering the page, staining the white, different sizes of letters and the words going every which was, random and unorganized.

 

Eren stared at it, eyes pale gray and blank, then flipped the page over and started again.

 

“Hey, Eren,” a woman at his elbow said gently. “Hey, c’mon, it’s time to take your meds, okay?”

 

Eren nodded dumbly and took the little white paper cup she gave him, pouring the pills inside into his mouth and following them with the water from another cup. He swallowed, feeling them slide down his esophagus, and went back to his drawing.

 

They were locking him away because he was a public menace, they said, he might hurt someone, they said, he was dangerous to everyone and most of all himself. He paused in his scribbles, looking at the bright white bandages covering his left hand and forearm. They matched his white pajamas. He hadn’t felt his hand go through the window, but the doctors told him he cut himself to the bone in places, severed tendons in others, and that he might never be able to use his hand again.

 

Eren didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything anymore. It was over for him. He was locked up, he was officially crazy, and he could never get out because unlike the other patients in this white white white mental facility, his crazy wasn’t the kind you could fix.

 

Armin and Mikasa sat next to him, watching him with their sad heavy eyes. Eren used to have eyes like that. He looked away from them, back to the white paper on the white table, and slowly covered it in black.

 

A man sat down across from him. Eren ignored him. It didn’t matter if you ever talked back to the other patients in here.

 

“Hey.”

 

Eren carefully penned out another _crazy_.

 

“I said hey, you shitty brat.”

 

He glanced up at the swear, taking in the short man across from him, before lowering his head again.

 

“They say you see things.”

 

_crazy_

 

“They say you punched a window trying to get at a hallucination.”

 

_crazyCRAZYcrazy_

 

“They say you talk about the Titans and the walls.”

 

_cr_

 

Eren raised his head. The man stared back.

 

They always say that eyes are the windows to the soul, but this man’s eyes were a mirror, a cracked mirror, and Eren saw himself in them, he saw how broken they both were, how they both knew you can never really fix a broken thing.

 

Levi watched the boy stare at him. His brown hair was dull and ruffled and his gray eyes held just a hint of washed-out green. He looked like Levi felt, like he was defeated, like every moment of his life he’d been burdened with a terrible curse.

 

Beside him, Hanji laughed, throwing her red-brown ponytail back. “I think you’ve found a friend, Levi,” she teased, and on his other side he heard Erwin’s deep chuckle.

 

Maybe they were cursed, Levi thought, maybe they were crazy, maybe they couldn’t ever be really fixed.

  
_But at least we don’t have to be alone._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still sorry


End file.
